Hi, On 12/02/2012 12:02 AM, Russell Coker wrote:
Well the drive manufacturers SAY that there is a difference. There is apparently nothing illegal with down-playing the features of your cheaper product to increase sales of your more expensive product.
True.
I expect my consumer drives to run 24*7. I have two in my home server that have been running since 1TB was a big drive, one in my gateway system, three servers with RAID-1 arrays in various parts of Melbourne (one of which had a drive die about a year ago and then had the replacement die the same day), and five servers in Germany with 3TB SATA disks in RAID-1 arrays.
I expect that many IT people run consumer grade drives 24/7, but most "ordinary" persons / families run machines for much shorter periods of run time.
That's 19 drives, 8 of which (4 of the German servers) are only a few months old, but the rest have all been running for years. I have a vague recollection that a previous German server had a SATA disk die about 3 years ago. So it's been 2 desktop drives lost out of 11 drives over the last 3+ years, or 3 drives if you count the replacement that lasted a couple of hours.
That's not bad. Besides all this standard vs enterprise, RAID is literally "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks" after all... and sure, many of us here would use RAID1 at least, lots of "ordinary" folk only have their data on ONE HDD, internal or external -- they don't do backups like they should and mirroring isn't in their IT vocabulary, but rather in their bathroom. ;-)
Things that are expected to wear out don't have the same warranty protection. Batteries have a certain life expectancy in terms of charges and the amount to which they are charged and discharged. The Prius is designed to not fully charge or discharge it's batteries and this means that they can last a long time. Laptops are designed to fully use the available charge and this decreases the battery life.
I understand that some products are more prone to fail sooner than other types of products, but if you are entitled to a 12 month statutory warranty on ANYTHING that is new, then why not batteries as well? And there is plenty of non-refurbished product selling with 3 month warranty as well, it makes a mockery of the statutory 12 month requirement.
As for short warranties on hardware, if you buy refurbished stuff from GraysOnline.com then a 1 year warranty is standard.
Okay, that is good to know. Cheers -- Kind Regards AndrewM Andrew McGlashan Broadband Solutions now including VoIP Current Land Line No: 03 9012 2102 Mobile: 04 2574 1827 Fax: 03 9012 2178 National No: 1300 85 3804 Affinity Vision Australia Pty Ltd http://www.affinityvision.com.au http://adsl2choice.net.au In Case of Emergency -- http://www.affinityvision.com.au/ice.html